Human Needs Quotes

“If your eyes can not cry, then your gut will."
The head and heart may be in denial of your human needs, but the gut will always carry the wisdom of your needs met and unmet, and thusly respond.”
― Martha Char Love, What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct

“Everyone is so locked into the current way of doing things, they never see the larger picture or other, more responsible and efficient possibilities. A REAL economy is always wanting to limit consumption/manufacturing as much as possible by assuring the strategically "best" and "adaptable" productions at all times, while keeping balance with human needs and public health.

It is a total shift in intent than what we have today.”
― Peter Joseph

“Loneliness is a form of narcissism. A mother who is in harmony with her child, who understands her place in her child's life and her role in society, is never lonely. Through caring for her child, all her needs are fulfilled.”
― Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

“Having needs is not evidence of weakness – it is human.”
― Danielle Bernock, Emerging With Wings: A True Story of Lies, Pain, And The LOVE that Heals

“Cultures produce myths because they satisfy a deep-rooted human need: the need to make sense of life. Myths are appealing because they reduce the complexity of experience, by making things seem simple and absolute; myths define popular realities which are accepted readily, even uncritically.”
― Matthew Screech

“You're the certainty of my uncertainty. Your significance defines the love and connection I have for you and I wanna thank you because you help me grow to become my full self and contribute meaningfully to this world we're both in.”
― Jayson Engay

“The desire to know and to understand are themselves conative, i.e., have a striving character, and are as much personality needs as the "basic needs" we have already discussed.”
― Abraham Maslow

“The fundamental emotional need of every child is being-with.”
― Dragos Bratasanu, Ph.D.

“It is our desire, not need, to be loved (back).”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Man is not a being whose exclusive purpose in life is eating, drinking, and providing a shelter for himself. As soon as his material wants are satisfied, other needs, which, generally speaking may be described as of an artistic character, will thrust themselves forward. These needs are of the greatest variety; they vary with each and every individual; and the more society is civilized, the more will individuality be developed, and the more will desires be varied.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Within the nature of every person is a desire to feel appreciated, to feel needed, and to be loved.”
― Ellen J. Barrier, The Price We Must Pay for Our Father's Sins

“It is not the development of material need which sets the modern vocabulary of aspiration apart from anything which has gone before, but rather the transformation of our spiritual needs. It is our spirits, not our clothes and houses and cars, that set us so radically apart from our own past and form much of the rest of the world. Imagine what we must be like to the primitive peoples who receive our attentions as anthropologists. We come upon them armed with our mastery of nature, and yet they can disarm us with the simplest metaphysical inquiry: what happen when people die? where do they go? what are the duties of the living to the dead? Their cultures are as rich in answers to these questions as our culture is rich in answers to the technical and scientific problems which baffle them.

It has always been a truism of the Western bad conscience that we have purchased our mastery of nature at the price of our spirits. The conservative and romantic critique of Western progress has always used the example of the savage - rich in cosmology, poor in goods - to argue for an inverse historical relationship between the development of material and spiritual needs. Certainly this view could draw upon the dark side of the Christian theology of need. While secular optimists have trust in the permanence of spiritual need, Augustinian Christians have fixed their gaze on the nightmare of the happy slave: the being so absorbed by the material that all spiritual needs have perished.

Yet human needing is historical, and who can predict what forms the needs of the spirit may take? There is a loss of nerve in the premature announcements of the death of the spirit, the easy condemnations of materialist aspiration in capitalist society. Western societies have continued the search for spiritual consolation in the only manner consistent with the freedom of the seeking subject: by making every person the judge of his own spiritual satisfaction. We have all been left to choose what we need, and we have pushed the search for private meaning to the limits of what a public language can contain if it is to continue to be a means of communication. We have Augustine's first freedom, and because we have it, we cannot have his second. We can no longer offer each other the possibility of metaphysical belonging: a shared place, sustained by faith, in a divine universe. All our belonging now is social.”
― Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers

“Three things have a limited threshold:
Time, pain, and death.
While truth, love, and knowledge -
Are boundless.
Three things are needed
For humanity to co-exist:
Truth, peace and basic needs.
Everything else -
Is irrelevant.


THREE BASIC TRUTHS by Suzy Kassem
Taken from "The Spring For Wisdom", 1993”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“You hate being needy but anyone who shamed you for needing support, safety, or love was just in conflict with their own neediness. People are built for emotional needs--it's what defines being human.”
― Allyson Dinneen, Notes From Your Therapist

“It is unhealthy to try to be Superman, standing with solitary strength facing our battles alone. We all need help. We need friends. We need advice. We need support and assistance. We need hugs, smiles, love, and encouragement. We are human, and that is how humans thrive—by working together.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Hope Evermore: Quotes, Verse, & Spiritual Inspiration for Every Day of the Year

“If the steam engine freed human beings from feudal bondage to pursue material self-interest in the capitalist marketplace, the Internet of Things frees human beings from the market economy to pursue nonmaterial shared interests on the Collaborative Commons. Many—but not all—of our basic material needs will be met for nearly free in a near zero marginal cost society. Intelligent technology will do most of the heavy lifting in an economy centered on abundance rather than scarcity. A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being’s worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons.”
― Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

“Every official Organization for the Defense of Fauna and Flora had blacklisted him: his 'methods' were deplored and he was reproached also with having often been mixed up in political struggles. And that was true. The roots were innumerable, infinite in their variety and beauty, and some of them were deeply implanted in the human soul — a ceaseless tormented aspiration, a need for infinity, a thirst, a presentiment, a limitless expectation: liberty, equality, fraternity, dignity...”
― Romain Gary

“it’s not a free choice when you depend on it”
― Laura Gentile, you ate popcorn in my house of grief: transgenerational poetry

“Human beings are a highly social species with a long evolution that makes us desire both autonomy and connection. We need to grow and express our individuality freely--and at the same time, feel like we have people to rely on to love us and have our backs.”
― Allyson Dinneen, Notes From Your Therapist